Stoicism, the Emotions, and Modern Psychotherapy: A Conversation with Donald Robertson

[Music] so hi there Donald it's really great to see you again yeah hi David it's a pleasure yes and my name is David fight Larry I'm the editor of the stoic incites website and it's my pleasure today to be speaking with Donald Robertson who's the foremost authority on the relationship between stoicism and modern psychology and he's the author of half a dozen books I'll list them below the video but I did want to mention a couple of his books that I highly recommend one of them is called stoicism and the art of happiness and it's a very very clearly written guide to the entire philosophy of stoicism is very easy to digest I really highly recommend that and then the other book of course is how to think like a Roman Emperor the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and if you've had any exposure to stoicism at all over the last year then you've probably seen this book and I very highly recommend it it's very well written very beautifully written and in this discussion we're going to be talking about the relationships between stoicism the emotions how negative emotions come into being and how to manage them and the influence of ancient stoic philosophy on modern psychotherapy and there is actually a very strong influence there and you have if you haven't read Donald's books you've probably not heard about it so we'll go into that but before he and how are you doing in Canada Donald with the pandemic because we're recording this in the middle of April and everything everything is locked down are you okay there well then in the time of pandemic it's you know well as a writer and somebody who works on Lionel law it's it's not made that much difference to my daily routine I'm cooped up most of the time with my laptop anyway so I barely notice the difference but yeah we certainly are we're living through interesting times and I like to say to you know maybe this is a little bit of a stretch but you could potentially regard the meditations of Marcus Aurelius as in part at least has attempt to apply stoic philosophy to the the time of the Antonine plague and the pandemic that he was living through overly only really explicitly mentions it once you can nevertheless see what's going on in that book is a guide to coping with the pandemic it's very more of what he was doing and eventually it ended up killing him unfortunately so Donald if it's okay with you I'd like to start off with a brief story about something I experienced when reading your most recent book if that's okay and so I was reading your book how to think like a Roman Emperor and in the last chapter Marcus Aurelius is on his deathbed dying and his life is flashing before his eyes and is very beautifully written and the ideas of stoic philosophy are going through his mind as well as the stoic philosophical exercises and it's so beautifully and powerfully written because you know his works so well that you were like it was like being inside his mind and you were really able to capture his voice and I have to admit that when I was reading that it was very powerful and I felt sort of like tears welling up in my eyes and I'm sure that I'm not the only reader that had that experience and since we're talking about stoicism and the emotions what I wanted to ask you is is there anything unstow ik about feeling emotions like that you know that you that's a really really good question and I'd never really thought about the final chapter like that is very much designed to evoke an emotional reaction and so there is a gain of paradox about that and I you know if you'll forgive me if sometimes I like to answer questions and I slightly roundabout way so I if you'll permit me a slight digression I just wanted to mention there in the Roman history's history August ah and actually I'm one of our other sources we're told at least twice maybe three times of Marcus Aurelius wept and public which makes that people be interested in knowing and in the historia Gaston were told that he wept when one of his chatters died we don't know which one it was they you know possibly one of his stoic mentors or tutors and the the palace servants tried to restrain him because they were embarrassed they thought he was it wasn't becoming of a future Emperor to show emotion like that and Antoninus Pius his adoptive father reputedly said let him be because philosophy can't take away natural affection of this claim that's a a natural emotional response and I think the Stoics would say the same thing I mean very very simply the way that I see the the stoic attitude towards emotion and there may be some scope for interpretation may be the different Stoics Deford about this but it seems to me that the story to want to say that there are reflex like natural emotional reactions that we have first of all lot more of a complex actually about basically we there are certain emotional reactions that we even share with our animals so an animal that loses its offspring might be sad or an animal's experience fear and frustration and anger at least I cannot call two types of those emotions the precursors of them and I think the Stoics want to say like in that famous passage in Seneca where he says look you know an animal like a deer that sees a predator will become startled and anxious and then run away but the differences at Ritter then it'll return naturally to grazing when this rate is gone whereas humans are cursed with reason as well as being blessed by it and so we continue to ruminate about things in the past and worry about things in the future and I think that's doings basillica it's okay to have these kind of natural reflex like emotions their physiological phenomenon they says they're indifferent morally but what we shouldn't do is amplify them unnecessarily or perpetuate them unnecessarily and in some ways that actually can affect sin with a rug the Romans had this concept that went all the way back to King Numa the founder of the religion that they had this prescribed number of days or months for mourning and it would depend actually on the age of the person they were Mourning and so they had this kind of idea that there was an appropriate duration the grief might go on further it was natural then beyond that limit so they started to become pathological or unhealthy potentially which is a very simplistic way of understanding it but nevertheless I think that's what the Stoics have in mind you know they don't want to eliminate all emotion but they want to prevent us from indulging and unhealthy emotions are allowing our emotions to overwhelm our reason right so the reason I raised that question is one of the points that you often make is that the word stoic today means something totally different than what it meant in the ancient world in terms of being a philosophical school and people have this very misguided notion that stoic should never experience emotions or be sort of like intellectually detached and spock-like about everything but like epictetus said he said you know Stoics are not unfeeling like a statue and they're set up that other quote that you know from seneca that no school has more love for human beings than the Stoics did and Marcus has this passage where he talks about one of his sort teachers say I saw being free from passion and yet full of love for others and I was wondering if you could explain what the Stoics meant by passion because that's another word that doesn't actually correlate with our modern word emotion or our modern word passion they meant something very specific by that I you know dear here's another level aside for you that particular passage in Marcus Aurelius where he he talks about one of his two it was being free from passion and yet full of love for a fuller story I think it's a word that he uses natural affection I think I mentioned that in a talk or something at one of the conference's and John sellers and when one of our models doesn't seem one the leading authors my stoicism said to me that's a great passage to mention when people are used Eagles yeah that's the one you should make you should mention that passage to people to deal with this misconception that stoicism is about being unemotional having a step up or lap and so it does it should strike people as paradoxical if they think that being free from passion means eliminating or operating or emotion it's a contradiction how can you be completely free of any emotion and yet full of love that's because in part the Stoics you know when they talk about the passions they're predominantly referring to what they considered to be unhealthy passions and actually there's a passage and diogenes laërtius unfortunately it's kind of tucked away in the sort of secondary so us where they are what are they jesse that's about stoicism are are not any Seneca or epictetus of Marcus Aurelius but can I talk to Ian and some of these other sources and he says and they are that the Stoics the referred to the the passions as being unnatural excessive and irrational and that would fit very neatly with a kind of modern cognitive therapy conception it's particularly unhealthy irrational excessive emotions that we'd be targeting or looking at and you know again I have this kind of simplistic way of understanding what the story is here about emotions it's reasonably accurate its allocation maybe and I would say the Stoics want to divide emotions into good bad and indifferent ones you know so it's actually a bit more nuanced than people might realize it for us so there are these unhealthy passions and confusingly they just used the word the unqualified term passion to refer to them this is just maybe another your sink recei in a way of the Greek language that they use of what you they use this word which sounds like it means all emotional but really they're using it to refer to unhealthy emotions and they contrast it with new fai which means as qualified use of the word which means healthy passions rational moderate emotions and then also the prop FAI or the precursors of emotion the reflex light ones so an addition to so they're unhealthy emotions that Stoics want us to deal with irrational excessive then they want does not just tell them any all emotion but to replace them with these healthy ones are moderated by wisdom that would be appropriate to the wise man or woman and they also want us to be neutral or indifferent or accepting towards this other level of emotion the pre castles or first movements or proto-tool passions and I light emphasize that because it's really integral actually to modern cognitive theories of emotion we would look at it in a similar way that many people it's fundamental in a way actually that many people exacerbate mental health problems by trying too hard to control what we would call automatic thoughts and feelings that aren't directly under the voluntary control so stoicism could become toxic if it was misinterpreted to mean that it requires an effort to suppress or control these property I and these involuntary emotional responses when in fact particularly there's a again a fragment and attributed Technic teachers from one of the lost books of the discourses it's quoted in all ask Elias Roman grammarian and he tells us a great story about how he was on a bullet with a famous stoic teacher from Athens he doesn't name so we can have fun can I try to figure out who he was talking about if it's someone we even know and he says they were caught in a storm and everyone was freaking out they all thought they were going to die and then they got to shore and julius approaches the sky he says listen I recognize you your student teacher he says I wanted to ask you you know the you weren't rolling around and screaming like everyone else but you were shaking and you turn pale and you were obviously scared Lea the rest of us how is that compatible with stoicism and the guy reached in his satchel and took out one of the books of Epictetus and quartered it to galius and explaining to him that the Stoics teach the there are these natural involuntary automatic reflex like emotions which he says need to be accepted as natural and inevitable and the difference as we said the earlier with the stoic wise man or women is that they don't then Romania about these things are exacerbate them he was experiencing seasickness and anxiety like everyone else but he wasn't you know running around complaining about and screaming and making things even worse than they needed to be so I again unfortunately you know maybe our best explanation of this is and one of the more obscure Stuart fragments yeah one of the things that really helped me to understand what the Stoics meant by passion was reading John sellers and John seller says is that the passion is always a violent emotion and it's so violent that it overcomes your ability to think rationally so I I found that to be very helpful there's another analogy they have to describe it which comes from I like to think there's a kind of hidden story or a subtext distances in which we have to speculate about it but it's fun and tempting to do that so we know that Chris IFAs was a long-distance runner we're told and there are a number of recurring metaphors in store some of these metaphors about ceilings and metaphors about the military and stuff but they also have a number of references to walking and running which I'd love to think I'll go back to Chris I pass and you know maybe this is heaven talking about his experience as a long-distance runner and one of them is that he says that the passions are like somebody who's running so fast the they're no longer able to stop or change direction and this comes back to what you said that the passion is kind of overwhelming reason and you know like anger being any passion we its it this to exceed of anger that it's temporary madness but all the passions are temporary madness as far as the Stoics are concerned because they make us less rational and that's very consistent it's a fascinating way of framing something that's very familiar in modern cognitive psychology which is that strong emotions and true just pronounced attentional and cognitive biases and what we call cognitive distortions or thinking arrows it's interesting because in it just a kind of brass tacks level when you're talking to clients in therapy you know often people remain to me a lot of the Aristotelian is maybe you know people walk well maybe anger as a useful emotion and one of the strongest counter arguments against art and practice is just to say to people but the anger introduces cognitive distortions people are clearly prone to over generalization black-and-white thinking jumping to conclusions when they're angry so we become inherently less rational the more angry we allow ourselves to get in inhibits rational problem-solving and things like that and it also does weird things to our focus of attention so so when you take a step back and you think about those qualities of strong emotions of Stoics were on to something you know we do become more irrational and that you can is that's obvious when you look at someone else's I agree we don't notice it as much from the other ones that are angry right we kind of like that so for me on the spoon you look at other people who are losing their temper it becomes obvious that they jump to conclusions and make sweeping generalizations and stuff like they're not thinking clearly and as lovers of wisdom as philosophers I should be enough matter as we want you know reason is very precious to us okay so could you explain to us what the cognitive theory of emotions and how that actually originated from the Stoics because I find that to be totally fascinating and most people probably have not heard about that well it's a great question as well I you know I've told the story a zillion times but there are many people aren't aware of it and I guess it has a very important thing because people might say well why is to is's of going through a release on so that's partly because of us so mmm we have to begin let's begin with all Bareilles right so we Freudian psychoanalysis in the middle of the 20th century dominated psychotherapy and then car long story short I loved that I could go into great detail about this but I'll give you their previous version so there was a psychoanalytic therapist called Albert Ellis who became disillusioned with the whole Freudian approach but many people have taken the in the 1950s and Ellis to say did he did something I always think is very admirable he said I'm gonna start again from scratch you know I said I'm gonna done trying to can I like tweak this in fact I'm going to scrap the whole thing and just have a break and then go back to like a blank slate and just build a whole new psychotherapy from scratch because that's these existing approaches just are not working out for me they're inherently flawed and he'd read Marcus Aurelius when he was a teenager and he drew on stores as a man and other things but a logic tent he drew an Epictetus the marks are really he he doesn't mention seneca much so I don't think he'd really read Seneca interestingly but he and he was particularly drawn to a very famous quote from epictetus its passage five of the enchiridion and it says it's not events the setters or the stresses but our opinions about them and I would dub that the most famous to it core at least in the field of CBT every CBT practitioner knows that core and probably for 99% of them that's the only thing they know that stoicism is just that core but they should all know what so Ellis even used to give that quotation to his clients though didn't eat ordered to pray it fries my way early he taught it to you all of his clients he implies he taught it to all of them and to students and he could sir I think in most of his he wrote many books and you know I maybe even quotes it in all of his books he quotes it in most of them so it's absolutely pervasive and what came to be known as rational emotive behavior therapy which is either the first form of CBT or the main precursor of CBT depending on how you look at her and so you know Alice built a whole therapy around us know this is important because the time and psychology there was from research on psychology and the emotions there was an emerging theory of emotion called the cognitive theory of emotion the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion and it was part of what was known as the cognitive revolution and psychology and so Ellis was kind of riding the crest of that wave as it were and also happened to connect ancient stoicism and he said look this is just a simplified this court just provides a convenient way a simplified way of teaching people about a theory that's there's no well-established in psychological research which is the idea that emotions are determined not exclusively but to a large extent to crucial extent by corresponding beliefs so for example short core are somebody who's anxious probably believes that something bad is about to happen and they make me wrong about that right I'll give it in therapy that is critical because people who have panic attacks often but not always believe that they're gonna have a heart attack and die and they're you know invariably wrong about that like panic attacks feel like you're having a heart attack but you're not actually so it's like an a false alarm so people have a mistaken or a false belief about what's actually about to happen and so I let other my favorite way of explaining this is that when clients come into therapy they'll spend a long time in the initialization talking about their anger fear or sadness and how it's making their life miserable affecting them at work destroying their relationships and all the negative consequences of that right and then it'll become evident just from the stuff they are saying that these emotions are a big problem so inevitably they'll start to think I guess I should get rid of this anger or fear or sadness or whatever do something about it but then they'll at some point in the session they will usually attempt to justify it by saying I know it doesn't make sense I know it's excessive unhealthy and irrational but and this is a critical chess move that they make it's just how I feel right right their way of defending itself ending the conversation is to say I can't do anything about it right it's just her a few why I'm stuck with that anger that I have the depression or whatever even though it's all I've got all these terrible consequences for me and I should want to get rid of it and Alice one of the ways Ellis would respond to that would be to say yes but you know it's not just how you feel it's also how you think and that's a neat way of encapsulating the cognitive theory of emotion because as soon as people recognize that the fear isn't just a feeling it also is constituted by certain underlying beliefs those beliefs have truth value and that means you can question whether they're actually accurate or not that no gives you leverage that you didn't have before because if they go it's just a feeling kabuna Noboa if you've got no you believe something bad is gonna happen and you might be wrong about that or you may be exaggerating it or you might be hastily jump into it you know no we can pull our part and it opens a whole repertoire of therapeutic techniques that we can know deploy in the session that now we have opened the gates to cognitive therapy from that simple observation alone that it's not just a feeling no feelings our thoughts feelings our beliefs are at least out there very closely connected with them and the Stoics knew that two and a half thousand you know two thousand three hundred years ago and it's shocking that for over half a century psychotherapists kind of ignored this or most of them dead yeah it's really amazing because you know the ancient Stoics believed that basically all strong emotions or passions actually came from opinions or intellectual judgments and for example like Seneca talks about the judgement when people feel angry they always feel the main judgment behind anger for example is that I've been harmed in some sense and then they want to achieve some kind of revenge and I have a story in this book I'm writing on Seneca I have a couple of chapters one is how to overcome worry and anxiety and another one is on anger but just sort of like illustrate this idea that judgments are behind emotions let's say that you're walking down the street one day and it's raining and there's a big puddle and a car goes by and splashes you well how you react is really based on the kind of judgment that you make about that because you could just say oh I just got splashed by a car but another person could say ah damn you you've ruined my day and so that person feels that they've been harmed and because of that a passion is generated and you know who knows they might try to take revenge on the the automobile driver but it goes to show you that if you understand the judgments behind you know these very powerful emotions that we have you can actually disable the emotions and in fact one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius is about this he says get rid of the judgment and then you're rid of the I am hurt and get rid of the I am hurt and then you're rid of the hurt itself right yeah then that passage vehicle is this you know what was clearly a kind of established cognitive formula theory of anger that was too excited because you're right it's the same you know exactly the same idea is in Seneca and in other other writings that we have a Erin Beck's example of this again is also very very simplistic if I remember rightly the way that he used to explain it so the founder of cognitive therapy to his clients he would say something like imagine you're in your bed at night and you hear this kind of creaking of the the floorboards and so you you can half asleep and you you think you've heard something you know it broke it into your home and so you're anxious and you may be angry and you cannot get in your dressing gown or whatever and you can only hover you you go and check downstairs or look around your house to try and find out whereas so you're feeling anxiety because you've heard somebody walking around in your house in the middle at night right and then you realize that the creaking is just caused by the radials coming on or something like that right and then as soon as you realize that there's an alternative explanation then you and then you know to be as accurate as we can about this because having explained there's a zillion times to clients or therapy you know of course yeah it makes toll take a while for you to come though him but nevertheless you know having noted just as you said as Marcus books it just eliminated that judgment you know there isn't somebody in the house it was something else that caused her it would be surprising if the anger and anxiety continued regardless lay a mate carry on and make take out you know a few minutes or whatever for you to calm down but it's gonna go away because you know realize you were wrong you were mistaken about what you thought you held and so that's like a really clear example I mean obviously emotions are a lot more complex than that there are some emotions are that seem less cognitively mediated so for example if someone runs up behind you and goes boo you know you you jump over your skin and your heart start racing and stuff and that's anxiety that doesn't seem particularly cognitively mediated this Mollica a reflex response but nevertheless generally speaking most of the emotions that we struggle with seem to be heavily cognitively mediated and it's clear we also have this outcome research from cognitive therapy that shows that when you actually do sit down and you know try to work on emotions with people it does typically you know change the way that they feel we you know it's the we have research as we like to put it sometimes in psychotherapy the address is both the idea that cognition is the cause and the cure of pathological emotions so we can look at people that have pathological emotions we can identify that the suffering also from the store to thinking but we can also try changing those thoughts and then see that that has a positive effect on their mood right there's also that famous quote attributed to Viktor Frankl that goes between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is our power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth and our freedom and actually I did a bit of research into that it turns out that Viktor Frankl actually didn't say that it seems to go back to Rollo May that's like a long story - Romi really you know and you know the again it's surprising that these guys don't think rolla may had read the Stoics I though there's no hint that Franco as far as the Stoics but many you know everyone that meets Franco Frank what he says in many respects he sounds that he's he's saying the same thing but then that maybe maybe David that's because the Stoics happened something that caught that was true they they they had this kind of vein of perennial wisdom and so it wouldn't be surprising and actually I'll say something about that in regard to cognitive therapy the relationship between the two so Ellis read the Stoics and and he he there's a shape that the key thing is the fun the fundamental premise of cognitive therapy is the cognitive theory of emotion everything else stems from that and not is in part derived from the stories are shared with the Stoics it's the same premise essentially that the Stoics adopt so for that from that same foundation you're gonna arrive at some of our conclusions so partly it's because cognitive therapy has the same premise like the same starting point historicism arrives at some similar conclusions partly ellis directly borrowed certain ideas from stoicism and then partly also he probably kind of indirectly absorbed ideals from stoicism you know he can it took picks up the flavor over and it influenced him in a more roundabout way and then you have the subsequent generation of cognitive therapist I should say that you know Beck had read the Stoics and mentions them very fleetingly but surprisingly I hardly any other cognitive behavioral therapy authors appear to have read the Stoics at all it's it that's one of those paradise even though it's so fundamentally important to the origin of the whole CBT approaches like Ellis read the Stoics and then nobody else bothered reading them but they often reinvent ideas that you can that can be found in stores and because they've started off from the same perspective that's a good argument for why cognitive behavioral therapists should read your books and one of the first books that you wrote I think it was the first book that I read is actually called the philosophy of cognitive behavioral therapy and that talks about this you know stoic elements and cognitive behavioral therapy when I was researching this interview with you I read about a bur Albert Ellis's ABC model of leaves and emotion and I was reading about it online and also in the book by your friend Jules Evans and that seems to have been based straight on Epictetus and so what Ellis says is there's an ABC sequence there's like an activating events which is a B there's a belief which would also be like a judgment and then there are consequences and depending on the belief you have that will determine the emotional consequences so I might make this into a graphic to flash over the screen on the video but then if you look at epictetus it's exactly the same phenomenon or the same structure rather so with epictetus you have impressions which are perceptions of external or internal events and then you have you know a judgment or an opinion that you give assent to and then if the judgment is incorrect then that will result in a passion or a negative emotion so that's like taken straight out of the start so I was really amazed - you mentioned sanika earlier anger as well and actually in an aura anger there's a passage where he describes it in very similar terms as well as kind of a three-step model when I read that I think gee that looks like it's come out of a CBT buh-bye he's straight-up describing a cognitive model there and I could just in passing I want to say like in therapy few people there's a bunch of different ABC models but this is the most famous one and the reason they say ABC it's like kiddies building blocks and so the idea is we have these complex nuanced theories that are males from the searching of psychology and then the weird thing about being a therapist is you have to read all the stuff and train on it and then you set in a little room with one person after another and and then you have to kind of somehow try and put expressions sort of translate that into layman's terms over and over again so a part of the job of being a therapist is taking complex technical research-based ideas and just trying to put them in plain English and and so Ellis's we are doing that is to go look it's ABC like simple as that you know and then oh so we have the the reason I'm saying that is that the actual research is more complex more ruins and so sometimes people say well that's a bit of a simplification isn't it there are some exceptions and there's more to it than that it's a deliberate simplification because it has to be made fairly simple in order to explain it in a few minutes to every random quiet you meet in a consulting room great and plus if you're like a if you're a psychotherapist you can use that to get your clients to actually under examine their underlying beliefs as well I'll tell you something that Ellis never said right so they also the other thing that that says you know it lends itself to being drawn on a flat chart and therapists love these little diagrams and things so again is their attempt to make it really some porous draw a little picture over and the we call this an orientation stage of therapy or the socialization phase of therapy so the client just wrapping their head around the basic premise of everything that are then gonna go on and do so to do therapy you have to pain and buy into the the concepts it's based on that usually happens at the beginning with these kind of this is the ABC model right that's the basis of what we're going to be doing over the next few weeks now Ellis never had this realization really the as back cutter in order to in order to dispute cognitive therapy largely consists in questioning the evidence disputing the the truth of certain beliefs the client told and as Beck said in order to do that clients have to be able to view their beliefs as if there were hypothesis as if they're up for debate there's a difference between somebody who says when they lose their job this is a catastrophe and they just they believe that's just the way it is actually as a catastrophe and someone who thinks I'm viewing it as a catastrophe but maybe someone else might view it definitely so let's evaluate the evidence for catastrophic errors or let's evaluate the pros and cons of view of interpreting it that way so the beginning of therapy is part of the socialization phase there's this idea that we have to kind of prize away let peel away people's judgments from the events themselves they have to be able to detach their opinions from external events separate them enough and bet called this cognitive distancing behavioral psychologists call the same thing variable diffusion so our judgments become fused with reality as if there's no separation between them and the starting point of therapy across having enough separation that we can at least begin to treat them as if they're up for the bay and start evaluating their evidence for those beliefs now what Ellis didn't realize I took a younger generation of therapists so Kim later they people start to started to say well hang on a minute why as if that's all you do right what happens if you just spend more time getting people to separate their judgments from reality and you don't even bother questioning the evidence for them because it seems to us like once you've made that separation then and the the belief is infused with reality anymore that the the emotional response is is what alone anyway and maybe you don't even then need to get into that lost in the weeds of weighing up the evidence Chrisitan be a lengthy process it can be a confusing process and that's the beginning of what we call the third wave in cognitive behavioral therapy started about 15 20 years ago and it became tied up with Buddhist mindfulness meditation because again is often the case people started there were two things and people inevitably saw and on these two things are really similar so people that were doing Buddhist meditation thought any meditation you don't start questioning and analyzing all your thoughts you just take a step back from them and view them in a more detached manner and so if you were doing more of this initial step in therapy it would be kind of a bit like what you do in your practicing mindfulness meditation now one of the paradoxes about this relationship between stoicism the CBT is that when Ellis and back drew inspiration from the Stoics they ignored a lot of what was to extend and one of the things that they ignored was the Stoics emphasis on a continual separation of our judgments from external reality and a continual krasiki or attention to our Faculty of judgment hegemonic on Nichola and so I would argue that the kind of mindfulness practice was already in stores um you know in essence and the the finals of cognitive therapy just didn't think it was important and it took the later generation who hadn't read the Stoics rediscovered that in the form of Buddhist mindfulness but they could have just gone back to the stories maybe the phone the same idea or a similar idea of their to begin with and so when people read the stories they makes if it does not the stories in some respects are questioning the the beliefs people hold their value judgments but no in the same way that cognitive therapist so there's not the same weighing up of evidence that you find in cognitive therapy and that's because Historics we're targeting things that are much more fundamental level they wanted to question whether the value judgments that we make and so a cognitive therapist might say is this event really as catastrophic as you think is where is the Stoics would want to say are any events catastrophic if there are external why they were targeted a more philosophical level a deeper am ethical level you could say they made it the Stoics would say those kind of values don't apply to any external events so you guys are getting too lost in the weeds of the Minish i you know this isn't across the board thing like nothing is that bad in life and so i guess we also forgot something about stoicism when we when cognitive therapist got their hands on it right there couple of letters from seneca where he's responding to questions or his friend Luke alias brings up and some of Senecas responses actually resemble kind of like little psychotherapy sessions where he's trying to get him to examine his underlying judgments and things like that it seems that there is a little difference between like so with like epictetus he's saying that you always need to be monitoring your judgments so that's like press okay and it's sort of like I guess that's sort of like Socratic you know questioning of your underlying beliefs and in my study of stoicism I can't really go give the full explanation of it but what I've come to realize is that the ancient Stoics actually saw stoicism as a way of liberating yourself from the slavery of bad judgments and cognitive errors that lead to negative emotions yeah yeah absolutely well you know like obviously Epictetus and urine notoriously I guess keeps and we have these these are connect transcripts from re on of his lectures he he was calling his student slaves which is obviously an irony because he was a former slave and most of them were probably arrested kratz you know wealthy a Greeks and Romans and and yeah I wanna clay this guy it came from a much lower grade and society is keeps calling them slaves all the time and that's because he's referring to this idea that they're enslaved by their emotions and trying to really kind of show up come into realizing that true slavery is is a state of mind yes and epictetus was a slave who became freed as well and the first sentence in Senecas letters to Luke alias he tucks Luke alias you must free yourself from the situation and the word that he uses is actually the word that's used in terms of like freeing slaves because Luke heylia's had become enslaved to his sort of like personal life situation he was like very successful but he had ignored his inner life so part of the project of the letters is like how do you free yourself from the way that you've enslaved yourself to be certain situations but to go back to cognitive behavioral therapy there are a lot of statistics floating around about how really effective it is especially in treating anxiety and I was wondering if you could just talk about that yeah gosh I mean that's that's a whole can of worms it's quite a big complicated question and then I know there's some debate about occasionally you'll get people who can on the skeptical side I don't really know if it's effective those people but the shorthand and such as especially when I you know I feel quite strongly I bet that's when we're talking about health care in general you know also we live in the serial fake news and so on and there is scope for to be you know but sometimes people always like climate sceptics and stuff like that you know people are entitled to be skeptical about things we need that when you tough healthy to be but it's important for people to realize that the people who questioned the evidence are kind of in the minority you know and that's about about that you know that that's a contagious view that the weight of scientific evidence is behind the conclusion that generally speaking cognitive behavioral therapy is the leading evidence-based form of modern psychotherapy and for that reason you know the NHS in the UK predominantly use CBT across the board for mental health everything has to be driven by very thoroughly you know a very rigorous scientific research and their conclusion is that CBT is the main modality of therapy generally speaking and also most insurers will mainly play or sometimes only fund treatment using CBT because it's an evidence-based approach they don't want to fund forms of psychotherapy that lack an evidence base and you know the other thing I'd say about that is that CBT in a sense isn't one therapy no it's kind of misleading because the idea behind that is an evidence-based approach to psychotherapy and there are hundred at home maybe 100 - there are dozens and dozens maybe a hundred or more distinct protocols or you know each protocol you could say is cane of a therapy so a lot of different forms of CBT and and sometimes you wouldn't even recognize that they're part of the same approach they can be quite different and some of them are more based on behavioral psychology and some of them are based on cognitive psychologists quite a while rivalry between those two perspectives and then there's rivalry between the older what we call the second wave approach is represented by back in Ellison are followers and then the more recent what we call the thug wave on mindfulness and acceptance based approaches so see Beetee field itself is actually quite diverse right and every distinct condition there are a bunch of different protocols there's different therapies for different different problems and overall you know and a bit then equally you wouldn't want to get too lost in the weeds those bad I just want people to realize again it's a lot of complex and a lot of that nuanced CBT is better for some things and for others there are certain problems that are inherently much easier to treat than others I'm always shocked that the e I used to train psychotherapists and I was shocked when I trained them I could never wrap my head around the fact that so many of the counselors coaches and therapists I've trained even the ones that had been doing it for a while were often oblivious to the fact that there are hugely different success rates for treating different problems that's this I thought was so fundamental it baffled me that anybody that worked in the fuel would not realize it but over and over again in the therapist I was training or didn't even know this and that's a shocking level of ignorance really besides therapy feel this amaze right then it's a lot better now than it was 20 years ago but the you know for example you mentioned anxiety there are there are conditions where we have an almost 90% success rate so treating phobia which is one of the simplest forms of anxiety it has you know can be done in three or four hours of treatment and husba an 80% success rate you know so again like in terms of like debating it you know that there's not that much school you know we're fairly certain that we know how some of these problems work and how to treat them we also have quite high success rates in treating insomnia social anxiety we have about a 75% success rate in treating but then more complex more generalized problems like generalized anxiety disorder obsessive-compulsive disorder clinical depression we have a lower success rate you know it may be more like so 50 or 60% so these are harder problems to treat they usually take more therapy we still cannot try there's more competing theories and protocols so it's not a level playing field you know and one of the things I would say is that you know in actual fact although there is good reason to the cognitive approach is affected those thousands of studies like looking at it from different perspectives nevertheless it would be true to say that some of the most effective interventions in the CBT field are actually more of the behavioral interventions so the the most robustly supported the treatment technique in the entire field of psychotherapy is exposure therapy for anxiety and that's based you know pretty much entirely on our behavioral psychology model it's just the simple observation that when somebody has anxiety if they expose themselves to the thing that causes their anxiety if they've got cat for BF they go in a room with cats in it and they wait for long enough and they do that repeatedly under controlled conditions eventually their anxiety with the Bakke naturally and you know I think even the stories we're aware of this premeditated malorum yeah one of the really cool things that you do in your book on Marcus Aurelius is you talk about Marcus's ideas and then you go on to show how they correspond like modern ideas and cognitive behavioral therapy so that's very interesting it makes it very modern but this technique of premeditative malorum i guess it actually goes back to the cynics but the Stoics adopted it wholeheartedly and it's basically imagining you know unfortunate things that could happen to you so that you would be emotionally ready for them when they do and that would reduce the emotional blow of them and so what you're saying then is that that that relates to this technique that you mentioned in cognitive behavioral therapy again this is a weird shocking thing about the history of psychotherapy but you could so you may look at the Stoics and think well surely in a sense this is obvious it's common sense you might see that if you expose yourself to things that make you feel anxious and you just wait out your anxiety or we're off even one of Aesop's fables uses this as a premise he has that the feeble if anyone wants to look up about the Fox and the lion is clearly predicated on the idea the fox sees a lion in the forest and he's frightened by it and then the next day he goes back again and looks at it from a in the bush and he's still anxious but not as much as before then the fog tapers back and he's even less anxious and he's able to walk up and become friends with a lion this is clearly predicated on the idea of the repeated prolonged exposure leads to emotional habituation as we would say in the jargon of psychotherapy so you could say maybe this is a kind of common sense observation that the Stoics seem to have been aware of and and you could do it in reality we call that in vivo exposure but we also know what it's almost as well if you just do it your imagination which is what the stoic seem to be referring to protocol they say annika but then the again the really shocking thing about this is that Freud didn't know that Y for half a century why psychotherapy was dominated by these guys that got knighthoods and were lauded as you know like eminent psychiatrists and in a sense were oblivious to walk for two and a half thousand years too many people just seem to like common sense you know that's surprise when you look back on things that seems really odd that someone would go to Freud with our cat phobia and Freud would say this is gonna take years why you can have to lie on this couch and tell me about your dream is in order to deal with us and it's probably repressed on castration anxiety why it's got to do be your relationship with your mom and dad and whereas you know most ordinary people naively would think maybe if you just learn to pet cats up in your patient and wait you'll get used to them your anxiety will wear off but it wasn't until the 1950s 1960s that psychotherapists we discovered something which you'd think would be glaringly obvious and which II thought and the cynics and the Stoics seem to have realized yeah actually used this technique of premarital premeditation malarum in regards to my son who's like about six years old because on the third floor of our house we have some wooden stairs leading up the earth that are extremely dangerous and I was very concerned about him you know when he was a baby like falling down the stairs so I did everything that I possibly could rationally to prevent that from happening so we built a wooden gate at the top and locked it at nice who couldn't like wander down there and fall down the stairs and everything and when he would go down the stairs in the morning I would say to him Benjamin be sure to hold the railing when you go down I would say that every single morning but I kept meditating upon this because I knew that it was inevitable that at some point he would fall down the wooden stairs it's just a fact of life I mean I fell down the stairs when I was a kid and I figured that by thinking about this on a regular basis that I would be emotionally prepared for it and when he fell down the stairs I would be able to help him in that panic because I had really thought it through in advance whereas I think my wife probably would have never thought about it and she would have been you know screaming or something so it happened actually you know a few months ago he fell down the stairs and he was towards the bottom of them and he got a little scraped up but it wasn't anything serious so I felt that it did help me it could have been much worse I'm grateful that didn't happen well you say you mentioned at the start that we're living in the time of pandemic and yeah the moment I'm getting Makenna bombarded with people wanting to write articles or design courses about how people can be more resilient during the pandemic and I actually had tweeted about this fellow there although there are lots of things that we can do to help people and maybe somebody actually said they saw this was a bit of a good thing to say but I mean oh and very seriously you know the the main way in that the Historics would recommend that we learn to be more resilient in a pandemic is to prepare for it in advance why it's you know it's kind of like the the you know in some respects the horses already bull could you know it's about we can what in the middle of the situation start working in the way we respond to it well the stories with tell us to do is to prepare a long in advance you know they were the Seneca would do say the magic you know that you might get L imagine your own death you know imagine things like pandemic you know way before it's even in the news I on the horizon great if these things are part of life I actually did that because maybe it was twelve years ago there was the h1n1 bird flu which was actually far worse than the corona virus in some ways because it had a sixty percent mortality rate it wasn't as easily transmissible but I did take some precautions and I boss you know some of those you know face masks and things like that and what Seneca says is that you should imagine everything in advance you know bad that could happen so the the real attitude of the stoic is that if something like this happens you should say i when it happens you should say you know I expected it to have yeah and actually in this particular case that's true because you know I've thought that for years something like this could happen it was just a matter of time so it finally did and I think that helped me to you know deal with it because I haven't felt any anxiety about it at all of course I'm careful so you mentioned cognitive distancing and there are some like philosophical exercises the Stoics used which relate to that as well so maybe you could explain you know to the listeners how the stoic how some of the stoic philosophical meditations involve a form of cognitive distancing well the main thing so there are let me see there are many different exercises that the story its use in my first book and stoicism Oster they'll think about 18 separate psychological strategies that I could then find that in the story writings and over a decade later I think that West is still very much the same in my mind you know that that's round about right that's about you know some of them divided down more because there's a there's a lot of different psychological strategies that they use so specifically to achieve cognitive Destin's the main one really would just be that quote from epictetus all or one just telling yourself it's not things that upset as our judgments about them or opinions about them so sometimes people wouldn't recognize that as being a technique but as a tech nearly just literally just telling yourself that I'm understanding it would give me enough to gain cognitive distancing some techniques and therapy are more concrete than others and some are more abstract more conceptual and some people have a hard time understanding that there could be such a thing as a technique that consists in just looking at something from a different perspective but looking at things from that perspective remembering that call is perhaps when the most robust when the most powerful techniques mysticism and there are other things that are can a link to it Epictetus also tells his students when they have a troubling impression and so I think there's long for a long media as that points us or maybe PR hodor that seems to imply that that's an impression that's already fused with a judgment of value so I picked ISA says when you have an impression about something that's upsetting you you should say to yourself this is just not just an impression and not at all the thing that it claims to represent and there are two things going on there he actually says you know you're just an impression he talks he tells his students to talk to the impression we can call that apostrophizing like talking to your thoughts so that kind of objectifies the for almost as if you're talking to another person that that same technique is actually used in modern thought wave cognitive therapy so you may say oh hello thoughts hello worried like as if you're talking to them that encourages you to do this weird mental gymnastics thing that we call cognitive distancing metacognitive awareness whereby you know view your thoughts as if you're looking at them from a distance so you might say I noticed know that I'm thinking that this is a catastrophe and would be another way of viewing your thoughts as an object the Stoics mentioned doing this they say you're just an impression you're dazz the thought and not at all the thing you claim to represent so reminding yourself that something is a representation and not to fuse it with reality but also talking to apostrophizing it and then the other thing which is a very powerful technique we sure Epictetus mentions I don't know if they'll start to mention that's maybe saying echo those Marcus doesn't this is more of a cane of behavioral technique exactly borderline between behavior and cognition so Epictetus several times tell us as students that when they're experiencing a strong passion they should what I do I would call postponement he says give yourself leisure i before acting up or not so we call a timeout strategy in therapy it's used in worry management anger management quite a lot so you notice when you're big get an early stage when you're beginning to experience a strong emotion and then suspend your response to come back to that's layer up so you notice you're beginning to worry about something and you go okay I'm worrying a bit money I'll come back at 7 o'clock tonight and all sit down and think of it as properly and one of the reasons that that benefits you is it inherently forces you to step out of the for and view the thought itself as a process or an activity so you gain cognitive distancing by doing that but it also means that when you start thinking about it later another situation that your feelings will have abated to some extent so the cognition won't be as intense it won't be as hot as we sometimes say and you'll be more able to think about it rationally in a detached manner but the in terms of cognitive distancing the thing is by saying I'm gonna stop thinking about the snow that forces you to step back from the floor and view almost as if you were viewing something that somebody else is doing right and that relates also to what you talked about in your book on Marcus Aurelius about the view from above as well as some people call you know looking at something Marcus earliest as a lad is he tries to get out of himself and look at nature from nature's point of view because one of the things you point out is that for example if you have a very strong emotional feeling or a passion or you're worrying about something you sort of like close in on yourself and so one of the techniques you can use is think about the world and your place in nature but over like vast periods of time and it makes you feel like you're part of a larger whole but also that your own worries of the time are less significant Marcus Marcus talks about this quite a lot he doesn't quite a lot and some things that look like in Hedorah talks about it and they're kind of literal sense of picturing things from above like the Zeus looking down from Olympus like in all those old films you know what quash the Titans and stuff you see the Olympian gods looking at humans as if they're chess pieces or something I like from this elevated prospect of the tiny humans and that that's kind of what it reminds me of but also had all recognized that sometimes when the Stoics or philosophers of other traditions who also do this technique are doing cosmology any time they're doing cosmology at all they're kind of expanding their perspective and the viewing thing you know the process of thinking about the whole of nature as itself could be seen as a contemplative practice and again it's really easy for people to kind of you know brush past us and not really realize how profoundly significant air actually is but these are three I think takes well you know is that you know again one of the most robust findings in modern research and psychopathology is that when people are very angry or very anxious and particular we we can focus our attention in different ways and we can pay attention to we can walk into gum we can think about two things at once you know you can be driving your car and also thinking about what you're gonna have for there not tonight you know and then also kind of having a conversation with somebody in the back seat so you think we can do multi we can multitask great can do several things at once but people find it harder to do that under stress so the scope of their attention becomes gnarled like a laser beam and they become much more selective about the things that they pay attention isn't when someone's really anxious these uh lately zoom in on the possible signs of threat what we call it's called threat monitoring in psychology and their environment and that leads to a form of cognitive distortion called selective thinking so there may be things in your environment that would actually be evidence of safety that you're now just ignoring because you're just looking at those possible sources of danger so that may lead you to arrive at very distorted conclusions very distorted perceptions of your environment and so generally not just when they're talking about cosmology you're picturing things from above but generally speaking that the stories want us to think about the bigger picture and view things from abroad or temporal prospective and spatial perspective because they rightly I think conclude the one of the the ironies of human nature is the you know we only see what's right in front of us and here was beside those like our bodies lamellas to just having these little slices of time and space but our intellect knows the the universe is much faster than us so there's this kind of conflict between what we what our bodies are telling us at any given time the information we're getting from our sensors and the the fact until actually we know that the whole universe is a much better story than us and this is really just one fragment over and the Stoics think we'll Zeus God would be aware of the whole of space and time so on the one hand they think the philosophers by trying to look at the bigger picture are emulating Zeus and this is kind of the goal of life we should try and perfect wisdom by adopting this kind of cosmic divine perspective but also we're lying to ourselves we commit a lie of omission you know it's uh it's so what we think of it as a lie when we say something that that's just false to facts it's also kind of why when you leave out information and this store for the stories I think the we're constantly telling ourselves lives of a mission because we're constantly taking things out of context we're constantly engaging the Selective thinking because that's human nature and they want to counter that by reminding themselves to view things as far as possible within this bigger picture putting things back into the broader context and they rightly understand that when you do that and a lot of people again this needs to be explained to them that initially I know that people find this hard to grasp but when information is bearing in mind that wimmer anxious or stressed we tend to threat monitor and focus on isolated things we know that when you reverse that it tends to dilute strong emotions one simplistic way of explaining that is that if you imagine that you're just looking at something that's kind of threatening and dangerous you know putting on there a magnifying glass you're going to react to that if you broaden your perspective nuts over there but there's also calming and reassuring things dotted around it so you have this rich tapestry and your emotional response though is shaped by lots of different stimuli at once you're gonna have a more complex nuanced and moderate emotional response but it takes a certain level of maturity to be able to take and that they go round a more complete picture right you're never going to have the same kind of intensity of emotional reaction that you would if you ignored everything else and just focused in isolation on this one bad aspect so broadening perspective inherently requires using more of your brain if you like it's kind of more challenging but it's bound to bow and so it and moderate your emotional reactions if you think about it that way and I think again the Stoics were 2300 years ahead of their time and and they they had some intuition of that yes being able to perceive the whole in that way is a very important human capacity and I'm afraid that probably a lot of professional philosophers have overlooked this back that if go back to the Greek tradition and just say for example like look at the pythagoreans and Plato and then the Stoics they're all actually very closely conjoined in this sort of like underlying assumption that philosophy itself is about understanding the relationship between the parts and the whole and today we're often focused on just the parts but really to have a satisfying life and a satisfying worldview you have just have make some effort to see how the parts and the whole fit together and if we neglect the health of the whole it will definitely have some negative consequences for us as a as a species I think in any event we've been talking for about an hour I have one more question and one thing is that in the future I hope we can talk about stoicism love and friendship because that's another thing that relates to this theme of emotions as well and I know you've done some research into that there's a lot of information on it but I just wait see I remember when I was at university a long time inhabiting one of my lecturers introducing the subject of friendship when we were talking about Aristotle and he I remember him saying with us kind of like a slight you know bemusement on his face he said what models was--was aren't really interested in friendship but for the ancient Greeks it was one of the most important topics in philosophy and that observation he made always stuck in my mind and it's true it's not and essentially not integral to modern philosophy or modern psychotherapy I think that the Stoics and Socrates and the other classical and Hellenistic philosophers are array the if we're going to understand self-improvement and understanding what our relationships and understanding what friendship means is crucial that's very important and if you go back to Socrates the way that he saw things was that dialogue was something that really took place among friends and it was a way of journeying together towards the truth there's actually a good book about that called the spiritual art of dialogue by Robert Apatow and he talks about this whole Socratic technique dialogue and the elements that you know it encompasses and then with Aristotle if you look at his ethics he view he viewed friendship as being instrumental to living a good a happy life and his chapters on friendship actually take up 20% of his books on ethics so that shows you how important it is and it goes on just through the Stoics and Seneca talks a lot about it and and he's trying to show some ACCA's trying to show in his letters to Luke alias what an ideal kind of philosophical friendship could look like and one of the things that I've been thinking about too is that there's an epidemic of loneliness now and I think it's because Aristotle he talked about how there are three different levels of friendship and the highest level is based on character so you look at another person's character and you see things that you like in it and someone looks at your character and they see things that they like in your character and then best like the basis for a deep kind of real friendship rather than just seeing what you can get out of another person in a utilitarian way or just feeling happy to be with someone I mean that that's fine that's good but I think there's this deeper level of friendship that the Greek philosophers were really committed to and it was really part of the whole philosophical experience and I think that one of the reasons there might be so much loneliness in the world today is because that level of friendship is something that seems to be lost in a way maybe I'm wrong but when I was researching I discussed this in the first chapter of my book it's called the lost art of friendship and I googled the phrase why don't I have any friends and I found I I came up with like 5 billion results for that so the bad seems to be somewhat alarming to me yeah that's pretty shocking I wonder awake to what extent this is a cultural phenomenon and but there yeah there are many things that we could say about this I mean in a way I think it's just to have that sort of relationship requires something like putting more maybe putting more effort and in a sense to understanding people and empathizing with them and judging their character and it's almost like a natural inertia like we're bound to if we don't have any incentive you know to think more deeply about relationships there's a natural tendency just to kind of drift towards professional relationships like we can and need to be encouraged by our parents or educators or by society you know to look more deeply and if nobody's can and nudging is like there's something about human nature that that makes us gravitate towards viewing things and this lazy can superficial level and it leads to lazy super professional relationships but like Marcus Aurelius talks about this idea as well of you making an effort to view people's character as a whole and really understand what person is like in lots of different situations how they eat their meals you know how they relate to other people you know during good times and bad times you know how they sleep you know to picture the whole person and I noticed as a tendency in modern society to kind of respond to the appearance rather than the reality and to judge other people just on like individual remarks that they say rather than interpreting those remarks in terms of their character as a whole so generally there's a superficiality about things and I I don't know you know maybe social media contributes to that something about our culture contributes to it but there's a there's a laziness of a its social media in particular I was full of people reacting to surface impressions and you know you know quoting people out of context misinterpreting what they say jump into conclusions about what they meant rather than kind of like trying to empathize with them and get behind their remarks understand the magic oh yeah it's very hard for example to have a conversation with someone on Facebook because the the way that people usually react is they just comment on things and there's a big difference between commenting on something and having a real conversation with someone and entering into a dialogue and I just think that there's some sort of innate human need for having you know deeper levels of friendship in the soul really and that if that's not satisfied then you're going to feel like you're disconnected from people and social media could certainly exacerbate that feeling but it seems to me that the really highest level of friendship is something that we see in sort of like or a potential the highest potential level of friendship is something that we see in the letters of Seneca with Luke Elias because they're actually trying to help each other become better people and so if you were a member of a like ancient philosophical school that would be sort of like the ideal level of friendship is that there would be other people who are there for you you know with your best interests in mind and trying to help you become the best person that you can so it seems like friendship has been very it's a that idea of friendship is no longer part of philosophy if you go into the academic world but and it might be somewhat of a chaotic quest but I you know as one person I would like to see that become part of philosophy again because I think that really gives it a lot of depth that's missing so so let me ask you one last question because obviously you're well trained in cognitive behavioral therapy so that's part of your world but also stoicism as a philosophy is very much a part of your world too and so and obviously you see both as being very valuable and even related to one another but how in your view is it that stoicism actually differs from cognitive behavioral therapy I lay that question as well it's when I think about a lot you know the answer to is very sure in a way at one level stoicism is bigger it's deeper why sister systems of philosophy cognitive therapies of therapy and you know that like I like to think of things in people in terms of this formula they're you know someone's greatest strength is often their greatest weakness and vice versa so the reason the problem with doing stoicism in therapy is that its scope is very broad it requires adopting certain values by changing your fundamental worldview so in some ways it's kind a too deep and too broad to fit neatly into the consulting-room context but that's also its greatest strength because often when people look at CBT they think oh this is really cool by some profound psychological insights here but I'm only using it to deal with my panic attacks I'm only easier to deal with my depression what why wouldn't let's just apply generally across life as a whole and it's always puzzled me a bit CBT you know I think inevitably you would look at it and think if you really believe for instance the it's not things upset as bar opinions about them then what would the philosophy of life look like that was based on accepting the truth of that and and applying it consistently across the board and I'm always puzzled that cognitive therapists seldom asked that question it's kind of likely compartmentalize things I wrote that in my first book I said it's like they'll leave it in the consulting room weirdly and then to some extent the struggle with it and they try and think what would happen if I lived my life and accord with us but I think you'd end up with a force field life that looks quite a lot likes to us ISM so the difference in par is that stewart's ism as a philosophy has as broad or more pervasive rima and whereas cognitive therapy is inherently diagnosis driven by short you know a short term it's more compartmentalize generous because some exceptions to that and so when we try to break out of that we empower is by doing things that resilience training emotional resilience training which tries to build up emotional toughness or makes people less vulnerable to developing mental health problems by addressing the so called normal population before they have a diagnosis and the prevention is better than cure the holy grail of psychotherapy I like to say but particularly few take ideas from CBT and use them preventatively and across the board to build resilience again you end up with something that looks even more like stoicism but what it lacks is even when when people do resilience training the goal here's a bunch of techniques you might find them useful and it's presented in this kind of instrumentalist so you're taught Irian way whereas in stoicism it's like no you would adopt these techniques because they're true therefore soft cool truths and once you really grasp that then you would see the whole world through that lens rather than just thinking this is a useful thing to do a lot of way so I think if the father you push CBT to be more general the more it becomes like stoicism like a force for of life and there are other differences but that would be the main one and I mentioned earlier the CBT puts more emphasis on disputing the content of thoughts whereas because stoicism wants to go a deeper target things at a deeper level it's more metacognitive it's more meta ethical it's more about addressing the the not the content of individual values but the whole concept of how we apply value across the board right and so for example like cognitive therapy it's very solutions focused whereas what we find in stoicism is that at its deepest level it's about how do we develop an excellent character so it has sort of a larger you know perspective than that but it's very practical as well because you know it's it's oriented to you know dealing with you know the difficulties that cross our paths you know in in life and inevitably will you know affect us in one way or another thinking of an example actually from something we mentioned earlier we talked about panic attacks and how when people are and architect in me they often believe that another heart attack and die so cognitive therapist may attempt to dispute or disprove that mistaken assumption whereas a stoic would be more likely to question whether death itself is as catastrophic as we assumed so the stories would target a much more fundamental philosophical level right right well Donald it's really great speaking with you we'll definitely speak again in the future and I'd like to encourage everyone to look at the titles of Donald's books beneath the video and if you enjoyed this conversation and you'd like to hear more things like this dude subscribe to the stoic insights YouTube channel you know select notifications and also check out those stoic insights a website and it's been really great speaking with you and I want to personally thank you for all of the really great work that you've done in helping to you know spread these ideas it's really amazing how the interest in stoicism has taken off in recent years and you're one of the key figures behind that and obviously what you have to say and what the ancient Stoics have to say are really addressing a real human need in our in our modern time so there are a lot of people who are very thankful for all the work that you've done well thank you very much and then likewise you know thanks for everything that you're doing to promote these ideas and encourage people to engage with classical literature and ancient philosophy and it's been a been a pleasure talking to you okay great well we'll talk to you later then okay [Music] you

Channel: Stoic Insights

Views: 8,674

Keywords: Stoicism, Emotions, Philosophy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Greek philosophy, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus

Id: _LRguAv0Rc0

Length: 82min 6sec (4926 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020